A Note on the Exclusion Principle

D. E. Thomsen

Michela Massimi

S. Brandt

Abstract The exclusion principle is one of the most far-reaching theorems in physics. In a telegram to the Nobel committee, quoted in [1], Einstein wrote: ‘Nominate Wolfgang Pauli for physics prize stop his contributions to modern quantum theory consisting of so-called Pauli or exclusion principle became fundamental part of modern physics being independent from other basic axioms of that theory stop Albert Einstein.’ It is interesting to note that quantum mechanics, the theory Einstein alluded to, was formulated a little after the Pauli principle.

George Gamow

Henry Margenau

It is strange to note so little discussion of the exclusion principle in the philosophical literature. Philosophers, largely engrossed in their perennial problems, are hardly aware of the fact that, during the last two decades, there has been introduced into physical methodology a principle of utmost philosophical importance, easily rivaling that of relativity and, in some respects, indeed that of causality. Discovered by Pauli in 1925, it immediately elucidated a whole realm of physical facts and was accepted by physicists with wide acclaim. Called the exclusion principle—or Pauli principle, or principle of anti-symmetry—it was embodied in the axiomatics of quantum mechanics; its peculiar methodological significance passed out of view.

Wolfgang Ernst Friederich Pauli